Free Republic

Jay Z is continuing his fight against the criminal justice system by helping men who have been incarcerated but can’t get release due to exorbitant bail bonds. In an essay for Time magazine, Hov attacks the “exploitative bail industry” for their practices that he deems are unfair to black and brown people. “If you’re from neighborhoods like the Brooklyn one I grew up in, if you’re unable to afford a private attorney, then you can be disappeared into our jail system simply because you can’t afford bail,” Jay writes. “Millions of people are separated from their families for months at...

Immunity agreements offered to two of Hillary Clinton's top aides prevented the FBI from looking into the circumstances surrounding the use of BleachBit, a digital deletion tool, to destroy the former secretary of state's emails. In a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch Wednesday, four Republican committee chairmen demanded to know why Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, two witnesses who also served as Clinton's personal attorneys, were granted such expansive protections despite the FBI's awareness that they had participated in potentially illegal activities. For example, the FBI agreed to limit its search to emails written after June 1, 2014, but...

Democrat super-lobbyist Tony Podesta was paid $170,000 over a six-month period last year to represent Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, seeking to end one of the Obama administration’s economic sanctions against that country, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has learned. Podesta, founder and chairman of the Podesta Group, is listed as a key lobbyist on behalf of Sberbank, according to Senate lobbying disclosure forms. His firm received more than $24 million in fees in 2016, much of it coming from foreign governments, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

A New York City congressman said on the House floor that "every racist in America voted for Donald Trump." Hakeem Jeffries (D), who represents East New York and Coney Island, said "so many folks dripping in hatred flocked to his candidacy." "Why would people that worship at the altar of white supremacy [be] drawn to Donald Trump's campaign?" he asked.....

Last year, eight members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence issued a demand that their staffers be granted access to top secret classified information. The signatories to the letter were Andre Carson, Luis Guiterez, Jim Himes, Terri Sewell, Jackie Speier, Mike Quigley, Eric Swalwell and Patrick Murphy. All the signatories were Democrats. Some had a history of attempting to undermine national security. Two of them have been linked to an emerging security breach. The office of Andre Carson, the second Muslim in Congress, had employed Imran Awan. As did the offices of Jackie Speier and Debbie Wasserman Schultz;...

It's a tough time to work in national security and have opinions, or even a conscience. On Monday, a 25-year-old federal contractor named Reality Leigh Winner was arrested for allegedly leaking a top-secret NSA document to The Intercept. The apparent document, dated a month ago, contains shocking details about an alleged Russian cyberattack on a supplier of US voting software, as well as malicious emails sent to voting officials in an attempt to hack their computers. Unlike previous reports, this one, if accurate, was far more overt in what it revealed, leaving little doubt that the attacks were coordinated by...

Hillary Clinton blasted the Democratic National Committee on Wednesday, saying that she "inherited nothing" from the party after winning its presidential nomination last year. "So I’m now the nominee of the Democratic Party. I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party," she said during a question and answer session at Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. "I mean, it was bankrupt. It was on the verge of insolvency. Its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong," she recalled. "I had to inject money into it." By contrast, she said, then-GOP candidate Donald Trump inherited a well-funded and extensively tested data...

Clinton public appearances dominated by increasingly bizarre election defeat claims Hillary Clinton spoke to Goldman Sachs for the very simple reason that she got paid, the former Democratic presidential candidate told an audience at Recode’s annual coding conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. Clinton took the opportunity to blame numerous players for her election defeat on Nov. 8, and also to justify her use of the term “vast right-wing conspiracy” all the way back in 1998. The “conspiracy” against her, she suggested, is still alive. Clinton, speaking to Recode founders Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, said she didn’t lose because...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton continued her “sore loser” tour on Friday, telling Wellesley seniors that they were graduating “at a time when there is a full-fledged assault on truth and reason,” and likening the Trump administration to “authoritarian regimes throughout history.” History, evidently, is not Clinton’s best subject. She likened President Donald Trump to Richard Nixon, whom she said had been impeached. In fact, Nixon resigned.

**SNIP** 2016 communications director Mario Andrada revealed the reasoning behind the medal problems. "The most common issue is that they were dropped or mishandled and the varnish has come off and they've rusted or gone black in the spot where they were damaged," he said. "The second thing is that a small few, about 10, had problems with the extreme cold." Andrada also called the issues "completely normal."

Most voters aren’t buying the story that the Russians are trying to manipulate the election for Donald Trump but think the U.S. media is trying to swing things for Hillary Clinton. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 56% of Likely U.S. Voters believe it’s more likely that many in the media are working to get Clinton elected president. Just 26% disagree and say it’s more likely that the Russian government is working to get Trump elected. Eighteen percent (18%) are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.) Ninety-one percent (91%) of voters supporting...

A former official with the Democratic National Committee has worked in recent months with a convicted domestic terrorist-turned-activist known as the “Speedway Bomber” to gather information on Donald Trump, The Daily Caller has learned. That work culminated in a Washington, D.C. meeting in December between the ex-DNC operative, Alexandra Chalupa, the convicted bomber, Brett Kimberlin, and a South Africa-born Israeli man named Yoni Ariel. Ariel, whose real name is Jonathan Schwartz, traveled to Washington, D.C. to brief Chalupa and Kimberlin on his knowledge of Russia’s activities during the campaign. Chalupa, an activist of Ukrainian heritage who is strongly opposed to...

A former foreign policy adviser to President Trump’s election campaign says his phone may have been tapped in 2016, apparently implying that such action would support claims that Trump Tower was under surveillance. Carter Page, works near Trump Tower in New York and was a frequent visitor during the campaign. In a letter to the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee Thursday, he lays out a case for why he thinks he may have been swept up in any surveillance related to the Trump operation, the Guardian reported Thursday. “Having spoken in favor of some of Mr. Trump’s policies on...

As you know, we now have a roiling, renewed debate over whether a mix of Russian hacking and James Comey’s final week intervention in the November election shifted the balance in Donald Trump’s favor. Even more, it’s a public debate over whether Hillary Clinton should keep claiming this is so or just, in one side’s view, own up to her failed campaign and stop making excuses. Plenty of others have argued this case on the merits, particularly Nate Silver looking at Comey’s intervention and its effect on polls in the final week of the campaign. Others have delved into psychological...

In less than two weeks, the Office of Personnel Management is expected to launch the new background investigation service to help fix the mess created by a series of incidents ranging from a lack of contractor oversight to the massive data breach affecting 21.5 million current and former federal employees. Officials promise the National Background Investigations Bureau (NBIB) will be a much different organization than its predecessor, the Federal Investigative Services. “It will have a politically appointed director, will be headquartered in D.C. and be a full member of the Performance Accountability Council, so it aligns with customers for increased...

A top FBI official whose wife received political donations from an ally of Hillary Clinton’s last year does not need to recuse himself from the ongoing Trump-Russia investigation, the bureau said Wednesday. The Senate Judiciary Committee inquired last month about FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s role on the Trump probe, which is looking into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government. Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley had expressed concerns about a potential conflict of interest given that McCabe’s wife ran a state campaign in Virginia that received $700,000 from Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a close friend of Clinton’s. [...

Every detail was designed to mark Hillary Clinton’s moment in history — from the glass ceiling at Manhattan’s Javits Center, where her supporters were gathered, to her and hubby Bill’s suite at The Peninsula hotel, selected so she could personally see Trump Tower, home to the foe she was set to crush. Then came the voter returns. In this exclusive excerpt from their fascinating new book “Shattered,’’ political reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes take readers inside Hillary Clinton’s world on the night that changed her life — and the nation — forever. Hillary’s communications team decamped to the Javits...

Good lord. It’s one thing to blow an election once, but to lose hypothetically to a guy with a 42 percent approval rating again? Is there no limit to the humiliation the Clintons will suffer at Trump’s hands? We’ll have our answer when Ivanka and Chelsea inevitably square off in 2024. The same ABC/WaPo poll found that when 2016 voters were asked who they actually did vote for last November, 46 percent said Clinton versus 43 percent who said Trump — the same number he gets in this hypothetical rematch. In other words, given the option of a do-over, virtually...

Last October, Harry Reid, the ruthlessly partisan former senator from Nevada, wrote a nasty and bumptious letter to FBI director James Comey. The letter remains a significant piece of evidence in Obamagate, as it confirms his role as conduit for Obama administration’s political espionage against Trump. “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government,” he wrote. “The public has a right to know this information. I wrote to you months...

The knives are out in Hillary Clinton’s camp about who leaked embarrassing information to the authors of a bombshell new book about her “doomed presidential campaign.” There is a witch hunt underway among Clinton’s presidential campaign staffers after the release of the autopsy book, “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign” by journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. We’re told the details in the book, which depicts the campaign as inept, “could only have come from someone in the inner circle.” Dennis Cheng, the finance director of Clinton’s presidential campaign, has been sending out messages to determine where the leaks come...